Happy New Year! After a quiet couple of weeks, we are back in the office today and releasing OmniFocus 2.8 for Mac, which includes one of our most requested features: Global Search.

In OmniFocus 2.8, basic search works the same way it has since 2014: Click into the Toolbar Search field or hit ⌥⌘F and type the string you’re looking for. The outline and sidebar are filtered to show just items in your current view that contain that string (if there are any). The part that’s new in 2.8 is that instead of being limited to just searching the current view, you can click the magnifying glass icon in the search field and expand the scope! The three search scope options (Here, Remaining, and Everything) mirror the search options available in OmniFocus on iOS.

OmniFocus adds much more than Global Search, of course; the rest of the highlights of the release notes include full support for macOS Sierra’s tabs, a better Attachments window, a bunch of usability improvements and features to aid in troubleshooting, and as usual, a large number of bug fixes. We hope you’ll download the new build via software update or the App Store and check it out!

We’ve got a lot more planned in 2017 for OmniFocus! Next out will be v2.18 for iOS, which you can sign up to help us test. For the rest, Omni CEO Ken will reveal more in his annual roadmap post later this month. Thanks as always!

Pro and Standard

OmniFocus 1 was a huge success, and we think it provided great value for those who needed its power. That said, one of our goals for OmniFocus 2 was to help people who weren’t sure that they did need all that power, or worried it might get in the way. So we’ve chosen a streamlined set of features for the Standard edition of OmniFocus 2, while making some of the more complex features part of OmniFocus Pro. Those who are already making full use of the OmniFocus 1 feature set might want to go straight for Pro, but you can always start with Standard and then upgrade to Pro later.

Here’s an overview of the extra features you get with a Pro license:

Custom Perspectives: Create and save filtered and sorted views that are geared towards an area of responsibility, a regular activity, or a state of mind. Assign custom icons and hotkeys to make pulling them up a snap.

Focus: Hide everything but the projects you choose, throughout all views. For example, don’t get distracted by your home projects when you’re at work, and vice versa.

AppleScript: Use scripts to automate mundane actions, bring in data from other sources, and generally make OmniFocus infinitely powerful!

New Features for Everyone

Whether or not you choose Pro, OmniFocus 2 gives you a bunch of really cool features and a thoughtfully redesigned interface that looks right at home in the latest version of OS X. You can use the Forecast perspective to get a view of your actions laid out by date (and in context with what’s on your Calendar). In Forecast, assigning a due date to an action is as simple as dragging it to the appropriate day. The Review perspective gives you a structured way to take stock and make adjustments. OmniFocus 1 users loved the ease of Quick Entry, a way to capture OmniFocus items from any app. And now we’ve added Quick Open, a way to jump right to a folder, project, context, or perspective from anywhere in OmniFocus. And for those that need to generate reports for others to review or just to scribble on, we’ve beefed up printing and export so that the output is more like a document than a screenshot.

Pricing and Upgrades

OmniFocus 2 costs $39.99, with a Pro License at $79.99.

Customers who purchased OmniFocus 1 from the Omni Store can purchase an OmniFocus 2 Standard license for $19.99 or a Pro license for $39.99. If you bought OmniFocus 1 from the Mac App Store, you can buy OmniFocus 2 and get the Pro feature set for free. To make these options as easy as possible to take advantage of, we’ve created a separate page with step-by-step instructions.

Get Started!

If you’re looking for some help getting started, we recommend the set of “Support Short” videos we shot just for OmniFocus 2’s new interface. We’ve also created a whole new website called Inside OmniFocus to collect helpful information on workflows, systems, tools, and services that all work with OmniFocus. If you’ve been using OmniFocus for a while you might recognize the names and faces of our friends David Sparks, Sven Fechner, and Kourosh Dini. We’ve got new stuff from them, as well as from new friends Sabra Morris, Randy Hunt, and Jan-Yves Ruzicka. There’s a sweet User Manual available for free from the iBooks Store. And whether you have a question about how to use one of the new features or how to start fresh, our Support Humans are available by phone and email.

We hope you’ll check out OmniFocus 2 for Mac today. Just like all of our Mac apps, you can download a free trial from the product page (and switch between Pro and Standard during the 14-day period, so you can see which feature set fits your workflow the best). Thanks!

You may have already heard about a vulnerability called Heartbleed that affects secure communication with websites (summarized nicely at The Loop).

In response to this threat, Omni immediately updated OpenSSL to non-vulnerable versions on all of our servers. We then revoked and regenerated all SSL certificates and keys. It is safe to change your Omni Sync Server password at this time. We don’t have any evidence of malicious behavior, but due to the nature of this vulnerability, we’re recommending that all users change their passwords anyway.

Starting with the release of OmniGraffle 5 in 2008, we partnered with Graffletopia to provide in-app search for their free online stencil repository. Last year, Graffletopia became a subscription service, which meant that any stencils hosted there were no longer available in OmniGraffle.

We still feel it’s important for the OmniGraffle community to have a free library of user-submitted stencils, and we still want it to be easy to search for stencils from that library from within OmniGraffle. Since Graffletopia no longer offers that service, we’ve created a free Omni Library which can be searched by OmniGraffle 5 and 6 (starting with v6.0.5, released today) and OmniGraffle for iPad. We’ve already seeded the library with stencils that we used to host on our own OmniGraffle Extras page, but we would love for you to submit your own stencils as well.

We will never charge for access to these stencils; that’s not a business we’re interested in pursuing. We’re only interested in offering stencils which our customers can download and use for free, so we’re asking for submissions of stencils that are Creative Commons 0, public domain, or otherwise freely distributable.

As you may know, last summer we made the difficult decision to stop selling OmniGraphSketcher and focus on our other applications. As part of this decision we elected to remove the app from our website instead of continuing to offer it as a free product as we have done with other apps in the past. Why? People have continued to use those free apps, but we don’t have enough time to work on them. That means that when bugs crop up (usually in new OS releases), we aren’t able to fix them in a timely manner and everyone ends up frustrated.

With OmniGraphSketcher, we’ve decided to go a different route: open source. Open source means everyone has access to OmniGraphSketcher’s code, and anyone who is so inclined can work on it. Bug fixes are no longer dependent on our CEO taking vacation time, and new users can discover the app without generating support costs for an project that is no longer a revenue stream.

We’re aware that there are drawbacks to open source software, but we’re convinced that setting GraphSketcher free is the best option going forward. We’re proud of the work that we did on OmniGraphSketcher, and we’d love it if as many people as possible were able to use it. In fact, the support that we received for OmniGraphSketcher after we discontinued it is one of the reasons we think this project will work well.

For non-developers, a download of the Mac app is available from the new project’s home on GitHub. On the iOS side, submission to the App Store is dependent on a couple of trickier things, but we’re hoping that GraphSketcher will make it back there without too much delay.

If you’re a developer who’s interested in poking around the GraphSketcher source code, just:

git clone --recursive git://github.com/graphsketcher/GraphSketcher

GraphSketcher relies on our existing open source frameworks, but building the app is still as simple as cloning, opening the workspace for the app you’d like to build (Mac or iPad), and hitting the play button.

So, while it’s not the end of the road for GraphSketcher, we are putting OmniGraphSketcher to bed. If you’re a fan of the old app we hope you’ll check out the new project and post your feedback to GitHub for future contributors to take a look at. And of course our support humans will continue to provide assistance to paid customers of OmniGraphSketcher for Mac and iPad on the versions of OS X and iOS which they support.